Virus Hunters

with David Quammen

April 1, 2014

We live in an age when scary new viral diseases seem to be coming from nowhere — AIDS, Ebola, the latest influenza, SARS, West Nile fever, and many others. But they aren’t coming from nowhere. They’re coming from nonhuman animals, our fellow creatures on planet Earth. These strange new viruses lurk quietly in rodents, or bats, or monkeys, or birds, or other kinds of animal, invisible and harmless until they’re not. Then, when a suitable opportunity presents itself — someone kills and butchers a chimpanzee, someone breathes the air of a cave, someone handles a sick chicken — they cross into humans, causing horrific illness, sometimes death, sometimes outbreaks that grow into epidemics. The fateful moment when a new virus makes that transition, passing from its animal host into its first human victim, is called spillover.

It might all sound weird or improbable but it’s not. Most of our infectious diseases, including the worst ones, begin in this way.

I spent six years researching and writing a book on the subject, Spillover: Animal Infections and the Next Human Pandemic. I traveled to sites where such menacing viruses lurk — forests in the Congo, bat roosts in Bangladesh, caves in China, old sheds outside Butte, Montana — and peered over the shoulders of men and women who track and study these dangerous pathogens. And now I’ve teamed with some very deft filmmakers at Weather.com, offering them my leads and ideas, so they could bring you this series.

Every new viral disease, emerging from some animal host, begins as a mystery story. Which animal? By what route? And why now? The brave, smart people who tackle those mysteries, putting their lives at risk in the field or the lab, are the Virus Hunters. You’ll travel with some of them as you view this series. And here’s the good news: You won’t need a hazmat suit.

Cover photo: MARSHALL, LIBERIA - AUGUST 22: A burial team from the Liberian Ministry of Health unloads the bodies of Ebola victims onto a funeral pyre at a crematorium. The Ebola epidemic has killed at least 1,350 in West Africa and more in Liberia than any other country. (Photo by John Moore/Getty Images)

Red Cross workers carry away the body of a person suspected of dying from the Ebola virus, in the Liberian capital Monrovia, on October 4, 2014. By far the most deadly epidemic of Ebola on record has spread into five west African countries since the start of the year, infecting more than 7,000 people and killing about half of them. (PASCAL GUYOT/AFP/Getty Images)